Tuesday, June 26, 2007

System Breakdown

Its your first day of the semester, you have a nice crisp notebook, sharp pencils, some binder contraption, a mind heavy with both a deep sick fear and a bright optimistic anticipation for learning new things. And you are absolutely blindly convincing yourself that THIS year will be different.

This is the year that you will write neatly and establish a system of keeping your papers and thoughts organized in such a way that will allow you to retrieve whatever piece of information that you need in an impressive 5 seconds.

My question is this. When does an organizational system ever really last? It always seems to break down at some point. When you are tired and then busy and then lazy and then someone else changes it and then it spills and scatters like several shiny colorful marbles and as you watch them swiftly roll away beyond your grasp, you are disappointed, but not surprised.

The you that expected so much sits down quietly discouraged and foolish and the you that is now-is ranting and shuffling papers and waving hands in the face of the structure of discipline that it once actually attempted to embrace.

Only to start the next semester, or project, or living space, or file cabinet, or excell document with the same clean sheet and open heart and so on and so on.

2 comments:

  1. The semester takes over and things start to pile up and that's when the breakdown happens. It is almost inevitable. I've tried to stop the process each semester only to have to spiral out of control.

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